Virtual Companies – Operating without an office

Have you ever heard about virtual companies? Virtual companies are businesses which operates without having a physical office or at least with a majority of their staff working from home offices. We recently wrote about having an office nowadays is a luxury rather than a necessity. Today we want to talk about some companies who implemented the no-office trend.

Half of the jobs out there are compatible with teleworking

Not every business model allows a company to completely work virtual. Especially in production, you may still need people coming physically together on a daily basis. Nevertheless, most of our jobs or activities we do are actually compatible with teleworking. Flexjobs estimates that 50% of American hold a job which is compatible with teleworking. We talked about the working from home earlier.

Buffer and Automattic closed their offices to become fully virtual companies

In 2015, a social media marketing company called Buffer, ditched its office completely. Today there are around 70 people working completely remotely. They write extensively on the blog about the advantages of running a virtual company.

Another company who closed down their office in the move of becoming a fully virtual company is Automattic. Automattic is a the technology company which owns WordPress. Automattic has around 550 employees working remotely. Here is a great interview with the founder on the decision towards a virtual company.

A strong company culture glues the remote workers together

Both companies pay special attention to their company culture. Only with a high level of trust and respect, companies are able to work completely remotely. Saving on office rent is not the motivation of companies to go virtual. In the end, the money spent on office space will be relocated to costs directly to employees.

While mainly tech companies and startups are open for the idea of virtual companies, some big players in the market like IBM and Yahoo are maintaining the office approach. Employees have to work side-by-side.

A great collection of companies which work as virtual companies can be found here. For us, there is no doubt: virtual companies is the way to go if you want you have a company which is build on a fully committed team, operating in a global market.